Frankly, we need to admit that the current economic mess, regardless of who is to blame, has no easy fix. Everyone wants to know how the candidates plan to fix things. That’s fine, but we should realize that if an effective solution was known, it would already be in the process of implementation.

The economic bailout bill is one approach. Will it work? Ultimately, nobody knows, not even those who proposed it and voted for it. I do know that efforts to patch the systems failure that caused the problem won’t heal the damage, any more than surgically removing a bullet will repair the damage done by that bullet. If you shoot someone with a .45 hollow point slug, that person is in seriously deep trouble even if you then go in and remove the slug.

Does either presidential candidate have a plan that will definitely make everything good again? No.

Senators McCain and Obama don’t know significantly more about it than you do. Expecting either of them to “make everything better” once they are in office is unreasonable. And yet, if either of them were to admit this fact, that admission would likely lose them the election. Yet, we expect them to trot out their plans to get us out of this fix, and we look to them for our (financial) salvation.

There is an undercurrent that says that the next President is going to ‘change’ or ‘reform’ things, and I have no doubt that whoever he is, he will try his best. But we need to face the fact that we are in a bad situation, and there are no magic wands, nor are there any superheroes that can solve it. The most we can hope for is presidential policies that cause the economy to recover on it’s own.

We need to rebuild our own economy. We need to understand what we are doing to ourselves and our country when we take on more debt than we can handle. This country is theoretically governed ‘of the people, and by the people’ and in this case, we have failed.

Ultimately the reason this was allowed to happen is that we all voted for whoever we thought should be running things (all political offices, not just President). And then we quit paying attention, assuming those people we elected were on the ball for us.

Folks, we put the foxes in charge of the chicken coop. Follow the money trail, you’ll see what I mean.

We need to be managing this country ourselves. Not just vote somebody in and turn it all over to them. These people are our employees. We need to be avidly interested in what they do, and tell them when they aren’t being smart. We need to pay attention to events, and we need to communicate with our own government. And we need to be careful NOT to rely on the news media to keep us informed of what is going on, as they can no longer be trusted to faithfully report the news.

It’s certainly obvious that they need somebody to watch them. They can’t be trusted with our welfare, unsupervised.